Speaker 1:

Hi, and welcome to The Insiders by durhamlane, where we get perspectives from industry thought leaders about strategies that are unifying marketing and sales cycles to help accelerate growth inside your world.

Simon Hazeldine:

Welcome to The Insider’s sales and marketing podcast. I’m Simon Hazeldine. I’m a Sales Transformation Strategist and Sales Performance Consultant, helping my clients get more sales, more often, with more margin. I’m also a keynote speaker, and author of seven books on sales and negotiation.

Simon Hazeldine:

I’m your host, along with my co-host, the one and only Richard Lane, who is the Co-Founder of durhamlane. durhamlane are an inside sales partner that helps businesses to grow their revenue, through an integrated sales and marketing methodology.

Simon Hazeldine:

Richard, fantastic to be back in The Insiders studio again with you. I’m going to hand over to you, to introduce our guest for this episode.

Richard Lane:

Great. Thanks Simon and yes, great to be back in the podcast studio. Thrilled to be joined today by Darren Atkins. Darren is the Marketing Director at Sabre. Really looking forward to our conversation today around the worlds of marketing, sales, integration and everything in between. Simon, back to you to get us started.

Simon Hazeldine:

Darren, welcome to The Insiders. What we normally do is ask our guest just to give a little bit of background, how you came to be in the role you are in currently, just so The Insiders’ listeners can get to know you a little bit before we move into some of the other questions.

Darren Atkins:

Great. Okay. Thanks guys. Great to be here. How far do you want me to go back? I’d probably start with marketing. I was at Sony, B2B side of Sony, for quite a while. About 20 years. Initially joined in sales, then moved into marketing then, around 2010 time when marketing automation was becoming a thing, and out of that grew the idea of demand marketing. I was a big advocate initially of the methodologies of serious decisions and the demand waterfall, and that kind of drove my marketing beliefs and behaviors for a number of years whilst I was still at Sony.

Darren Atkins:

Then I left there and went to join a team at Canon, doing a similar role; heading up demand marketing. Then moved on into the travel space. Opportunity opened up to do a new role there, again leading a demand function. Did that for a couple of years. Was initially enjoying that role but then as often happens some frustrations crept in and I wasn’t getting out of the role what I wanted. I saw an opportunity at a competitor of the company I was at, offering the role that looked absolutely ideal, hence here I am.

Darren Atkins:

The reason that I think the role’s ideal is that it’s just an opportunity here at Sabre to lead a global team, but with a real opportunity to drive some real demand thinking and some best practice. That’s where I am, here today.

Simon Hazeldine:

Wonderful. One of those slightly awkward conversations there, when you let your boss know that you’re moving to a competitor.

Richard Lane:

“Where are you going?” “I can’t tell you.”

Darren Atkins:

Funny that, I was open and honest and I think that was the way to go, I think. I think I just laid on the line and it was fine. It was well managed and honestly, on both parties, I didn’t get shown out the door. I still served my notice and I think we’re still reasonably friendly.

Simon Hazeldine:

Which is always a good way to leave it. There’s some kind of impressive names in your CV. You’ve run demand gen campaigns for several companies now. What do you think are the most important factors that people need to take into consideration?

Darren Atkins:

It may sound simple and obvious, but in my experience the most critical thing is being really explicitly clear on objectives, right up the front. If you don’t get that right, in my experience that’s what leads everything else to go wrong. You need to be really clear about what it is we’re trying to achieve, how we’re going to track and measure success, and then look at how we optimize against those metrics and targets you’ve set at the outset. I think not getting that right is typically where things start to go wrong.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah. It’s actually, Darren, it’s kind of like a recurring comment from guests on The Insiders. Everybody almost slightly apologizes and says, “I know this sounds obvious, but it’s really important to have clear objectives.” Yes, it might be obvious but clearly it’s something that is sometimes overlooked.

Darren Atkins:

For sure. In every role I’ve been in, I’ve… Like you say, some impressive brands and you think, “They must have got it right. I’m going to…” At Sony, maybe not because as I say, it was at the outset of the idea of demand marketing really becoming a thing, but then moving to Canon and moving at my previous role to this and even here, you kind of think, “Well, well established companies, they’re leaders in their field, they must have got this nailed down and be doing it,” and it never is.

Darren Atkins:

There are always aspects greater or smaller in terms of still talking about awareness or even having metrics that are more output focused than outcome-focused. I think that’s still quite typical wherever you go, it seems to me.

Simon Hazeldine:

No, I think it’s a common theme, certainly I experienced. Richard, in your experience from a durhamlane focus on very clear objectives, how do you approach that with your folks?

Richard Lane:

What I was just thinking as Darren said that, we sort of obsess over, I call them four buckets, Darren. We talk about input; that would be the objectives, the clarity, the focus. Output; our gift, in terms of the effort that we put in, the creativity that we bring to it, the thinking that we put into trying to create the results. Outcomes; which are the key piece and then I think really importantly insight as well. Whether someone is interested or not, I think our customers want to know why. By bringing that insight back, I think you close the loop and then that takes you back to the beginning to review. “Okay, so based on that, what do the inputs need to look like again?”

Richard Lane:

I was just thinking then The Insiders MBA, Simon. That could be a spinoff, couldn’t it, because so much of business is staring you in the face. We sometimes get a bit focused internally and forget what’s in front of us.

Simon Hazeldine:

I think there’s a real challenge sometimes in organizations because of the complexity and how fast everything is moving to make sure you’ve got some of those fundamental disciplines nailed and they’re sometimes easy to say but not so difficult to execute, like Darren’s saying, that clarity of objective for example, before you do anything else.

Darren Atkins:

The thing is it’s not easy. Ultimately, what I’m trying to do, and I wouldn’t say I always achieve it, is it’s a massive challenge in terms of correlating revenue with marketing activities. Being able to look at that all the way through the pipeline to, what’s the impact of your doing here that’s driving revenue? Doing that is hard. There’s no getting away from it. It’s not an easy thing to do and every company’s got its own challenges in doing that, as it has at Sabre today.

Darren Atkins:

One of the things I’ve been focusing on for the last few months is defining a really clear marketing metric that is worthy of putting on the leadership scoreboard and that isn’t, in honesty, at this point driving to revenue. It’s where we’re trying to go, but it’s a key metric we’ve now agreed is the best we can do today whilst we’re still moving towards that real holy grail of really correlating marketing to revenue.

Simon Hazeldine:

Which like you say, it is the holy grail, which is going to be of a difficult thing to achieve. Another thing that I think a lot of our listeners tell us that they find difficult or are struggling with or working their way through, is sales are marketing alignment. It’s a key concern.

Simon Hazeldine:

When we were having a conversation before, we started to record the episode, you mentioned you had an example when you were with Canon, that you thought it would be good for our listeners to hear about and to learn from. Be fascinated to hear the story there.

Darren Atkins:

The real difference at Canon was they’d set up what was called a “sales and marketing excellence function”, which was essentially there to establish best practice across the company in terms of combining sales and marketing. Rather than, in every other company I’ve been in, where you’ve got a sales function vertical and a marketing function vertical and they don’t meet in terms of management structure until you get right to the top, this was a VP of Sales and Marketing who was ensuring that everything we did considered sales and marketing together, and so, everything we did, whether it was a campaign or a program or any kind of initiative, was done jointly between sales and marketing.

Darren Atkins:

One example I can recall where that came about is a fantastic piece of work that the sales side had started looking at and developing, which was around the whole go to market structure. Canon was selling both directly to large corporates, as well as through channel partners, as well as even some online sales as well. It was looking at comparing potential share of wallet versus current share of wallet and therefore, based on that, should we have a dedicated account team? Should we use inside sales teams? Should we use our channel partners? It made loads of sense, but then we brought that together and said, “Well, okay. What’s marketing’s role in that and how could marketing support each of those different go-to market strategies?” Based on what marketing was saying we could do well or we would struggle to do, that reflected back into that go-to market planning and you got a joint approach of what’s going to be the optimal approach for each of those go-to market strategies.

Darren Atkins:

I think it was just a great example of not doing something in isolation and then trying to figure out where does the other team play. It was doing it right up front and thinking about the optimal performance for the company. I think that was the best structure I’ve seen in terms of really driving that sales and marketing alignment.

Simon Hazeldine:

Rather than one being bolted onto the other late in the day and therefore being a lot less impactful.

Richard Lane:

I wonder whether ABM methodologies facilitate that integration, that one connected approach. Would you agree with that?

Darren Atkins:

I think today in other companies where sales and marketing works best is where you’ve got an established ABM methodology and function. Obviously, by its nature and definition ABM’s not going to work and unless you’ve got really strong alignment between sales and marketing. I think the difference between that is while I see that working well, even here, doesn’t mean that same alignment applies outside of the ABM program. We’re running other demand programs that aren’t ABM aligned and that alignment is not as strong as it is in the ABM program, which is what I’m trying to improve and shift.

Darren Atkins:

That’s what the difference at Canon was, was every go to market strategy you had, whether it was ABM or not, was still thought about from the perspective of sales and marketing together and not, as you said Simon, trying to bolt on once you’ve made a decision.

Richard Lane:

It is really interesting because at durhamlane we’ve created a sort of RevOps role, which I think is becoming more and more popular and certainly coming over from the US. It’s becoming more common in the UK. A RevOps role typically owns new business sales, owns marketing and is responsible for customer success as well. That’s how we’ve pulled those three areas together and that works really well for us, so we do have that connectedness. You still have to work really hard though, to make sure… Even though you’ve got one person at the top that is responsible for those, you’ve still got to then get those three parts working well. We’ve got some really excellent examples of how that works. I think we’ve also got some excellent examples of how we have to work hard to make it work.

Richard Lane:

I see ABM as an enabler, as a term and a strategy. I think there’s… Where we play, Darren, particularly is in that what I would call always on type mindset. I think we’re going to talk about the baton analogy later on and whether that’s right or wrong, but it’s the connectedness between your functions to ensure that when the right person inside the right type of company, that you’ve decided is the fit for your business, when they show a sign of interest, that needs to be taken through and nurtured. I just see a big chasm there across a lot of organizations still, where that interest is created and that’s a tick in the box for marketing, but then there’s just a gap. I don’t think anyone’s doing anything wrong but there’s just a gap between responsibilities to really nurture that conversation through into what I would call a sales ready, meaningful opportunity. Oven baked sales opportunity as it were, rather than someone’s shown a bit of interest. I think that possibly is where the gap exists today.

Simon Hazeldine:

In terms of that gap, Darren, your thoughts on where a lead is passed over from marketing to sales, people talk about passing over the baton, that kind of thing. What’s your perspective on how, at Sabre, you make sure that happens and it’s effective and it doesn’t get dropped, for want of better language?

Darren Atkins:

I do worry that the idea of a baton passing sets the wrong expectation right up front, in terms of there’s a role for marketing and then at some point, and that point may differ, it gets passed to sales. Then marketing do what? Step away and stop working that opportunity? I don’t subscribe to the idea of a baton passing.

Darren Atkins:

If I had to think of an analogy, it’s more the idea of a more modern football team. If I go back to when I used to play football, it was a very strict 4 4 2. Everybody knew their role, defenders defended and attackers attacked, and you all got defined roles. Whereas today in football, where you see the best teams are playing, it’s a much more fluid approach where defenders attack and attackers swipe back and defend as well.

Darren Atkins:

Sorry if you’re not into football, but I see it as it’s morphed into that. Roles will change and differ based on the program you’re trying to run and the objective you’re trying to drive against. There will be slightly different roles for sales for some opportunities and slightly different roles for marketing. It’s not a strict line or one passes to the other. I think that, to your point Richard, of…. Yes, I think you’re right. It’s often easy to say marketing stop here and sales do that, but we know certainly in terms of ABM, marketing’s role doesn’t stop when a lead gets converted to an opportunity. Marketing’s role is still there to try and help sales convert that opportunity.

Darren Atkins:

As you say, if we’re looking at things like insights and intent you may even still be tracking some behaviors there that may warrant marketing getting back involved more than they were planning to because the deal seems to be going cold or it’s not passing through the pipeline as fast as we were expecting it to. I don’t think it’s a strict line of baton passing. It’s more of trying to understand there’s different roles that change over time and in each opportunity.

Richard Lane:

Maybe it’s more who’s accountable at what moment? That’s probably the right way, because there’s a supporting cast. One thing we always talk about in both our training externally and with our team internally is that the moments of interaction that we have with any potential customer before they become a customer are very minimal, compared to the amount of conversation that must be happening inside their organization for them to make a decision to change or to buy from you.

Richard Lane:

It’s probably more around who’s got the ball. I’m going to try your football analogy. Who’s got the ball at which time and who’s running to support them. There’s no point doing a… Well, you know when you used to watch your kids play football when they were just at those early days of it. There would always be one kid that would just dribble forever and dribble himself or herself into a corner. Well, if no one’s supporting them and they don’t pass the ball, then the net result is probably the same.

Darren Atkins:

Sounds like watching my team today, to be perfectly honest.

Richard Lane:

Well, Alan [inaudible 00:16:04] from Newcastle, I always think is a little bit toddler in his one, amazing ability but two, the inability to pass the ball. No offense, Alan.

Simon Hazeldine:

I really like the analogy. The more fluidity and agility about it. Analogies help. It would be a rather ridiculous situation in any decent football team, like our wonderful English Lionesses who have their recent victory… You don’t pass the ball and then go, “Right. That’s my job done.” That sense of collective responsibility as well probably is something to be nurtured.

Richard Lane:

Isn’t it interesting, Simon, that in business people do exactly that?

Simon Hazeldine:

Yeah.

Richard Lane:

Which is sort of weird, really. I always think business is so strange in that we do everything outside of work in what you would call a normal, natural way. Yet sometimes when we get into work, we become siloed and we think, well, that’s not my responsibility or that’s not mine to do. Why does that happen? I don’t know.

Simon Hazeldine:

I think that’s just been a really great challenge for Darren, to the metaphor of the baton or the analogy of the baton passing as though it’s been passed over and that’s it. I think that’s definitely something to think about for folks listening in about… The mindset is really important because that starts to drive behavior.

Simon Hazeldine:

Been talking around ABM and you mentioned in our pre-interview that you use ABM to influence existing customers to develop a more positive perception of your company and your brand. Previous comment as well about share of wallet. Obviously, the easiest people to get business from, typically, would be existing customers so I’d be really interested in your perception and approach on that.

Darren Atkins:

I think at Sabre what’s kind of nuanced, in the travel industry as a whole, is it’s quite a defined set of potential customers. There’s not that many airlines in the world, there’s not that many agencies travel agencies that we work with, and in actual fact there’s not that many competitors. We know all of our target customers and they know us and they know our competitors. There’s no real or there’s very limited net new opportunity there. Most of what we’re trying to do, as you said, is drive repeat business, drive loyalty, drive up-sale, drive cross-sale.

Darren Atkins:

That’s where ABM plays pretty well. When we’re thinking about looking at key deals, we must either retain or will try and win back. That’s where ABM plays well. I think that what we’ve talked about before and what I’ve seen is, for us a lot of that is about brand perception and I think there’s been a bit of a pendulum shift back in terms of the idea of demand marketing in recent years, or certain people, the last 12 months, where I think people have recognized that some of the bad practices of lead generation were just not working.

Darren Atkins:

I say lead generation in the worst sense of the word. Where somebody would be downloading an eBook and getting chucked over the wall to an inside sales team, to inside sales to try and follow up. They downloaded an eBook. It was an interesting eBook. I didn’t mean I want to buy anything. I think that shift back now to understanding that there’s a lot more we need to do to even get potential customers in a mindset of we’re the right company they should be looking to deal with. That’s the brand perspective.

Darren Atkins:

I mentioned about being in sales initially, and when I was in sales at Sony a lot of my competitors used to moan and bemoan the fact that it wasn’t fair because I could always get a meeting with any client I wanted to because I was from Sony. They were probably right. That’s the power of the brand is because I got those four letters behind me, I could always get a meeting. Didn’t mean I’d close it, but I’d always get in the door. I think that’s a key part when we think about demand marketing. There’s a key role for marketing there, about getting that door open for sales, making sure if sales want to call that prospect, they’re willing to take their call and then also beyond that, making sure that that prospect or customer has got as positive perception of your company as you want them to have, and they understand your proposition and ideally, they understand why you are better than the competition.

Darren Atkins:

The better marketing can lay the groundwork for that, the easier sales’ role is going to be. I think that certainly at Sabre is a big part of our role. Is that brand perception perspective, rather than as I said, trying to drive net new leads.

Richard Lane:

Darren, what’s your experience of marketing’s role in growing your base? We’ve just done this at durhamlane recently. Marketing for us has always been around brand and trying to create net new customers. We’ve refocused some of that effort into how does marketing help our set customer success team to grow our base. Do you see much of that happening or is it still very outwardly focused?

Darren Atkins:

I think it’s always a balance, right? I’m going to get off the fence in a minute, but I think that’s the challenge. There’s no right or wrong, there’s no black and white, there’s the brand piece you’ve got to be putting out, as I’ve just said, about making sure that people know who you are, what you stand for, what you can deliver. Then there’s the piece about trying to understand who’s in play, who’s potentially in market today and how do you prioritize and identify who they are, so that inside sales teams or sales teams can focus on the highest potential prospects and where to devote their time. Then, as we’ve also talked about, that’s not where marketing’s role ends. You’ve still got to then try to drive that through.

Darren Atkins:

I don’t think I’ve really answered your question. I don’t see marketing’s role being one thing or the other. As we were saying earlier about the football team analogy, it’s trying to figure out what you need to play for that particular game and what’s going to work best.

Simon Hazeldine:

Just to loop back to your previous comments. Obviously, Sabre, your client universe is defined and therefore cross-selling, upselling has to be a priority. It’s just very interesting. In my experience, working with some of my clients and some of their sales teams or account managers, the cross-selling upselling is often missed enormously and I’ve lost count the number of clients who’ve said to me, “We mentioned this to the customer and the customer said: ‘I didn’t know you did that’”. It’s just Legion. It is quite frightening because we assume our customers are aware of the breadth of our portfolio and service offering and they’re not. They sometimes put you in a little box that they have in their mind.

Richard Lane:

I think it’s very convenient, Simon, when you buy something, you’re buying someone for a specific reason, selective perception kicks in and you think that’s what they do. Just a funny story; before we really honed in and focused on outsourced marketing sales and that integrated approach, we used to deliver three services, essentially. We did training, recruitment and outsource services. It was even on our logo. It said durhamlane: training, outsourcing recruitment or whatever. However, it was. We had people who said: “Oh, I didn’t know you did recruitment.” It was on the logo but people still don’t see it because they’re very focused around the thing that they want.

Simon Hazeldine:

A key job there, to make sure that we’re not missing a trick with the customer’s awareness. Darren, when we were talking before we came on air… Slightly provocative comment, which was really great. You mentioned your perception was that sales leaders don’t stay as up to speed with best practices and new development as marketers do. That’s a really interesting one. What makes you say that and therefore, what do you think sales leaders should be doing about this? That’s a bit of a concerning comment.

Darren Atkins:

I’m not sure I phrased it quite as bullish as that actually.

Simon Hazeldine:

I’m sorry. Sorry, Darren. I’m paraphrasing you perhaps.

Darren Atkins:

I’m just looking for any sales leaders coming down the corridor right now.

Simon Hazeldine:

None of your current colleagues.

Darren Atkins:

To be fair, I don’t have any proof. I don’t have any data to back this up. It’s a perception I have that certainly myself and other marketing leaders have seen. I’m usually quite willing to attend B2B marketing events. Actually, I did go to one recently and bemoan that it wasn’t actually that good and it was a waste of my time, but I always get a sense that marketing leaders are more willing to do that and stay abreast of best practice.

Darren Atkins:

Obviously, there’s been a lot of change in marketing over years. Just said about maybe even a shift back from lead generation to more brand focus work over the last 12, 18 months that I think I’m seeing when I read stuff on LinkedIn or even attend those events. There’s quite a lot of change, but I’ve never really seen sales leaders doing the same thing. I don’t know if that’s because events don’t really exist for them as much as they do for marketing, or whether sales believe that there is nothing new and they already know everything around it.

Darren Atkins:

One example which stuck in my mind about this, and maybe why it’s still there as a perception which may be wrong, is I mentioned SiriusDecisions earlier. When we were attending some of their events when I was at Sony back in… I don’t know. 2011, 2012. Found them really great, the VP of Emir came along to one, thought they were really great, said all the sales leaders need to come along because there’s a load of stuff there that sales could learn from, and so the next year we all went and there was about a couple of marketing leaders and five sales leaders. A head of each business division.

Darren Atkins:

Whilst a couple of them seemed to be relatively engaged, two of them didn’t even look up from their phones for the whole session. They were there because the VP had said they had to go, but they had no interest in listening or anything. Their minds were just shut. That may just be the individual, but maybe what’s caused my belief that sales aren’t as willing to go and listen to latest best practices while I perceive marketing to be.

Simon Hazeldine:

I have to say maybe the question was a bit more bullish because I actually have the same perception, Darren. My apologies. I might have been projecting some of my experience when I phrased that question, but it’s a bit like my goodness, if you don’t think the world of sales is changing, then my goodness. You’re aware marketing is of course, but sales is evolving and changing and what used to work just probably doesn’t work anymore. Richard? Your perception from durhamlane?

Richard Lane:

Maybe personal perception, rather than from Durhamlane. We could spend an entire podcast talking about this topic I think, guys. I take it right back to university even. On an MBA, there will always be a module on marketing. There will very rarely if ever be a module on sales. This is a hobby horse of mine, by the way. Just a warning. It’s also recognized that a sales job doesn’t count as a graduate job, so universities are not incentivized to try and post anybody into the world of sales because it doesn’t go against their quota from a government point of view. That’s concerning because it means that it’s not seen to be a profession. There’s lots of work happening. I was on an APPG, all parliamentary panel, for this a number of years ago investigating why. That was quite some interesting output from that.

Richard Lane:

I just think marketing’s done a much better job of selling itself than sales has, which is an irony. It’s seen to be more of a business function whereas the sales team, like old school sales team, they need to be on the road, they need to be in front of customers, there’s no time to go to a… “What do you mean you want to go and learn some stuff? I haven’t got time for that.”

Richard Lane:

I think there’s a whole complex array of stuff in there and people, frankly, if they do their number, probably haven’t been challenged to ever develop themselves. That world is changing so fast. If you’re not open, if you’re not looking at new ways of doing business, if you’re not opening your eyes and ears to new practices and approaches, as the world of sales and marketing comes together, if you think of the top of our podcast, it was all about everyone’s got to work together. You’ve got to be the football team. Agility, fluidity. It’s coming together into that one space. If you don’t want to learn, then you’ll get left behind.

Simon Hazeldine:

I’ve been doing a lot of work with clients on social selling. Most of the salespeople I’ve been encountering are with that as a general topic, I realized [inaudible 00:28:04] is actually quite concerning, when you look at how the customers are behaving and interacting with social.

Richard Lane:

If I can, I’ll just do a quick shout out to durhamlane’s new business sales team, because we’ve got a young group. They are excellent in terms of how they prospect using all different types of media. I would say they’re so focused on business fit and business value, they go in on a consultative approach and deliver value. Whether that customer ends up buying from us or not, they will have had a good interaction with our business and that’s the way it’s changing. There isn’t room any more for people that just want to dial for dollars sort of thing.

Darren Atkins:

The bit you said, [inaudible 00:28:46] all about social selling, it certainly sprung to mind again, but going back to my time at Canon in that sales and marketing aligned environment, I think it just came about more by osmosis than intentional, but everyone seemed to latch on at some point into the LinkedIn social selling index.

Simon Hazeldine:

Yes.

Darren Atkins:

I can’t even think of how we latched onto this. We could be trying to talk to sales about sales playbooks and looking at more how they could contribute to the marketing objectives and that social selling approach and we gave them a little bit of initial training, but what really drove the difference in sales willingness to start doing social selling was the competition aspect where-

Richard Lane:

Gamification.

Darren Atkins:

We published a lead table every month of who’s got the highest SSI score and that drove it through the roof in terms of sale’s willingness to get onto social media and start doing some.

Simon Hazeldine:

Somebody very, very smart at LinkedIn went: “Hey, you know what, if we dangle a number in front of them, they’re just going to fight each other to get the highest score.”

Richard Lane:

He hasn’t sold anything, but he’s got a great index.

Darren Atkins:

[inaudible 00:29:53] I was going to say as well, when you were saying about… I can imagine sales throwing that back at marketing. “Oh, I haven’t got time to go to a conference, I’ve got a number on my head. You haven’t, that’s why you can go to a conference.” I can imagine that being thrown back at marketing straight away.

Richard Lane:

Wouldn’t it be disruptive for… We talk about something at durhamlane called “one team, one approach” and we try and live that around the business, but imagine an org where marketing and sales are comped and rewarded together as one.

Darren Atkins:

I think that would be great. I’ve also advocated the idea of removing the terminology of sales and marketing, and as you said, having the revenue function… You don’t say who’s in sales and who’s in marketing. You’re all in a revenue focus function and your role is this and your role is now, but don’t call it sales and don’t call it marketing.

Simon Hazeldine:

We had another guest, Darren, who coined the phrase “Mar-Sales”, which is her description of what it needs to be going forward. Final question, we’re building The Insiders Spotify playlist, Darren, and we ask every guest to choose a song to add to the playlist. This is often the question that is the most challenging for people. What is your chosen song, Sir? What would you like to put on The Insiders playlist?

Darren Atkins:

As you’ve said, it is the most… Thankfully, you did give me prior warning and I’ve been doing a bit of thinking this week and I’ve come down on it. It had to be something from The Jam and I’ve finally settled on This is the Modern World, which I think is quite apt.

Richard Lane:

Beautiful.

Simon Hazeldine:

Great, fantastic. I think it’s the first Jam song, bizarrely, the first Jam song on the playlist. Fantastic. Goes quite nicely alongside my Pretty Vacant choice from the Sex Pistols.

Darren Atkins:

That was another one [inaudible 00:31:37].

Simon Hazeldine:

Ah, excellent. Yeah. Was a good one to go for. Richard, just in terms of key points for you from the conversation… There’s been so much great stuff. This is going to be quite challenging to choose a few key points, I think.

Richard Lane:

Yeah, it is definitely and Darren, thank you from Simon, myself and all the listeners for your insight today. It’s been a really great conversation. Just a few things I’ve scribbled down. Thinking in ink.

Richard Lane:

Clarity on objectives, so begin with the end in mind is key. Probably if you’re going to do one thing, then plan it out and understand what you’re aiming for. I made a note here. Even the biggest brands have to work hard for success. You might think that you look at other companies and they must have it sorted. Guess what? They haven’t. I loved the discussion around the to baton or not to baton, the football analogy with agility. I can just see Darren having his say but with wing backs and people striving forward and support teams coming around. The shift from lead gen to brand activation. I recognize that in the market as well where brand and then attribution. How do we know that we’re making a difference? Finally, probably big takeaway, certainly for leaders of functions that are listening to us is, maybe try and stop thinking about marketing and sales and think about a revenue operation and that chief revenue officer role is becoming more popular. Perhaps with that, we’ve got the opportunity to really integrate these two areas that are both totally vital to the success of any organization. If you don’t sell anything, then you don’t have a business and if you don’t have a brand, then it’s really hard to sell stuff. I think probably all sides of the picture have a really important part to play, but working together will be delivering the most success.

Simon Hazeldine:

Wonderful. Well Darren, thank you ever so much for sharing your time, your wisdom and your expertise with the listeners for The Insiders and to those listeners, thank you ever so much for listening into this episode.

Simon Hazeldine:

Please make sure you subscribe so you’ll get notified of Insiders episodes when they’re released, which they are being on a regular basis. We’ve some incredible guests, as evidenced by the quality of our interview today with Darren.

Simon Hazeldine:

Also, there are a number of episodes in the back catalog as well that you’ll be able to access and listen to from wherever you prefer to get your podcasts. Thanks very much for listening in and good luck to all of our listeners with all of their sales and marketing efforts.

Speaker 1:

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